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Taiwanese Food Fest at Stix, HRC

Sara Koshy
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Monday, 23 May 2016

There's a Taiwanese food festival in town and it's at Stix, Hyatt Regency Chennai's Sichuan restaurant. Partnered by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre in Chennai, it is also an occasion to celebrate the inauguration of Taiwan's 14th and first lady President. Chef Sung Chiung-Hung of the Grand Hyatt Taipei has curated this festival, along with HRC's new Executive Chef, Vikram Ganpule.

Chef Sung

Taiwanese cuisine has been influenced to a large extent by the southern provinces of Mainland China which include Fujian and Guangdong and also Japan. The food in Taiwan is light and fresh as the weather tends to be quite sultry and street food is extremely popular. The menu for the 5-day festival is a compact one and interestingly, the price of each dish ends with the numeral 6, considered a lucky number for it sounds like the word for wealth!

Plenty of ingredients; wok tossed blur of prawns

Garlic, salt & pepper shrimp

Being an island, seafood is abundant in Taiwan and it was a pleasure to watch the chef toss those really big shrimp in garlic, salt and crushed Sichuan peppercorns. A delicious dish though the shrimps were a tad overdone.

Green tea mushroom dumplings

Pretty green tea mushroom dumplings came around. Beautifully pleated, the skins were thin, part green and part white. Inside, the filling consisted of finely diced veg including mushrooms, water chestnuts and plenty of celery that gave crunch and flavour. However, there wasn't much to bind the filling together to keep it intact.

Green pepper pork & seafood pie

Green pepper pork and seafood pie consisted of a thin wrapper that enclosed finely minced pork and prawn. Quite like a potsticker, the skin was crisp, indicating it had been lightly pan fried. The delicate flavours made this one very popular at our table.

Pink Lady

The main course started with a plate of Pink Lady...err...ladies as there were 3 of them - blanched tomatoes stuffed with a mix of rice and corn. They looked prettier than they tasted. Corn, apparently is a popular ingredient in Taiwanese cooking.

Mango chicken roll

Another table favourite was the mango chicken roll where thin slices of chicken had been arranged on thin slices of mango and glazed with a sweetish sauce. The combination of meat, sauce and mango was exquisite.

Bacon fish roll

Pineapple fried rice

Pumpkin pork fried rice noodles

Listed as a main course, the bacon fish roll was also delicious. Can anything wrapped in bacon taste anything but good? Accompanying it was a bowl of pineapple fried rice and pumpkin pork fried rice noodles. I loved the fat, glistening grains of sticky rice but there seemed to be more of rice than other ingredients in it. Still, you could just eat the rice by itself with the pineapple adding little bursts of sweetness to the dish.

Mango sago; sesame balls with bean paste

Dessert was mango sago, a pudding with blobs of sago in a mango sauce and sesame balls with bean paste. How I wish there was grass jelly or bubble tea to end the meal with.

The Taiwanese Food Festival is on till May 24th and is open for both lunch and dinner. A meal for 2 would be around 3000/++.